Issue Date: 13 August 2023 UK Rising: 22% of Non-UK Tech Firms Eye Expansion Our latest figures show promise for the UK's inward investment position. We surveyed ~400 high-tech businesses planning to expand, who are planning to invest over £1.5bn. They shared their growth plans with us: 22% of non-UK tech businesses plan to expand operations to the UK The UK is a very popular destination for tech businesses from certain markets; specifically tech firms from the US, India, Australia and a number of Asian countries (if you would like precise statistics on this, there's information on how to get in touch at the end of this issue). It's evident that the British Isles are a hub for technological innovation and growth. This not only highlights the attractiveness of the UK market, but it also emphasizes the broader global trend towards tech-driven business expansion. Why is this? Global Tech has a Proactive Approach to International Expansion Traditionally, businesses would consolidate their domestic position before setting their sights overseas. Today's tech landscape, however, paints a different picture. More and more, tech enterprises – from startups to established players – seem to be looking at international expansion early in their life cycles. This global outlook enables these companies to tap into new markets, harness international talent, and diversify their operations, positioning them for sustained growth in an increasingly interconnected world. The UK's VC Landscape: A deeper pool Perhaps a big reason for this, is that the UK is the third largest Venture Capital market in the world. This is after powerhouses USA and China (though the Chinese VC market is largely insular). The deep VC ecosystem (approaching 800 early stage funds), is complemented by supportive regulatory frameworks and recent moves such as the Mansion House Compact. This makes the UK an attractive market to not just raise capital but also to innovate, collaborate, and expand. Closing Remarks: The UK’s unique blend of a deep VC ecosystem, ease of doing business, tax incentives and a forward-looking regulatory frameworks offer it a significant opportunity on the global tech scene. As these results suggest, now may be the most opportune time for inward investment professionals to capitalize on the UK's burgeoning tech marketplace. Stay tuned for our next issue where we dive into other trends and interview those in the Inward Investment Community. Inward Investment Insight is a newsletter, bringing the latest news, insights, and trends from the world of inward investments to professionals like you. This one is very UK focused, we'll be bringing different geographic perspectives in future. Get involved: 2 minute survey We'd love to hear about what you look for in early stage tech-businesses, we have a 2 minute survey that asks what criteria you look for when assessing businesses. For feedback and inquiries: please write to us at info@shipshape.vc, or book a call to discuss more on our research here.

How have we benefitted from choosing Tramshed Tech in Cardiff? Ranging from community or networking events to helping other startups search for funding, the relationship between shipshape.vc and Tramshed Tech has been reciprocal for both. Company Intro shipshape.vc was started in the middle of the pandemic in Swansea. It’s a free to use investor search engine - enabling founders to search investors by topics. We ended up putting our head office in Tramshed Tech, Cardiff after an Accelerator Programme based there. Tramshed Tech sits at the heart of the tech start-up community in Wales. We access collaborative working spaces, recording studios, a meeting/event space that has brilliant convening power (the First Minister, Ambassadors, VCs, Stock Exchanges, Private Equity firms etc. all visit!) as well as a range of business support programmes. So if you’re a startup, you can quickly build a great network that helps you navigate. And that’s mainly because Tramshed Tech have established a unique community that allows founders to connect with valuable individuals such as investors and advisors who can make a difference. Problem and Goal It’s hard for startups to find relevant investors. We make part of that easier by giving a free, powerful search engine to founders. Instead of trawling through investor lists, we enable founders to have targeted outreach. This enables founders to build relationships with the investors that can actually help them on their journey. Solution As a start-up, support is key to growing and more importantly learning. Being part of the Tramshed Tech ecosystem enables us to obtain user feedback. This in turn helps us improve our search engine and find other common problems founders experience. As a start-up that needs feedback to provide direction, being in and amongst our user base means we benefit directly. And it means we also get exposed to some of the tech breakthroughs that startups at Tramshed tech are making. Tramshed Tech have been brilliant at facilitating win-win introductions and relationships within their broad reach as ecosystem enablers with significant convening power. Results and Benefits We’ve made brilliant connections with the likes of Barclays Eagle Labs, the Cardiff Capital Region, the Welsh Government - including Minister for Economy Vaughan Gething, meeting Mubadala (UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund), Deloitte, University of South Wales, Angel Investors (a number of whom have since invested), meeting with the Badem-Wurttemberg Trade Mission, being involved with the Tech Export Cluster, and dozens more start-ups and ecosystem members. Tramshed Tech has continued its mission to support start-ups of which below are some of the ways that Tramshed Tech has directly helped shipshape.vc. Access to shared working space and collaborative working environment. Access to technical tools and podcasting studio that make our operations more efficient Exposure of shipshape.vc to the greater Welsh ecosystem, Welsh Government and international partners. Ability to work with large established companies that in themselves have created opportunities that otherwise would not be possible Support from key individuals internal and external to Tramshed Tech that has provided insight and learning from previous experience Mature advice from those who have ‘been there and done that’ on the direction and future of shipshape.vc. Future vision and aims shipshape.vc continues to improve, with newly implemented features such as viewing portfolio and investment entities, including the addition of U.S investor data. In July 2023, shipshape.vc will be three years old and to celebrate this anniversary and recognition; we’ll have expanded the coverage to include new geographies, so that founders have more relevant investors to reach out to in a targeted way. Summary In summary, the relationship between shipshape.vc and Tramshed Tech has been beneficial for both parties. It’s fair to say that start-ups benefit substantially in a number of areas by being involved with Tramshed Tech - it is a brilliant location for the tech industry across South Wales. We’ve benefitted from being part of this valuable community, and bringing others to it too! Being involved and becoming part of the Welsh start-up ecosystem has given us a great network and ability to navigate to where we need to be, quickly. It’s great to see Tramshed Tech expand across South Wales and to other locations. It’s been great working with Cai, Sophie, Sara, Gwenno, Eulalee, Mark and Louise and plenty of other members of the Tramshed Tech Team, who have really been friends to us from the very early days - we’re looking forward to where the future takes us! Notes to editor Ship Shape was founded by Daniel Sawko and Alistair Baillie and is currently based in Cardiff, Wales. To discover Ship Shape please visit: https://www.shipshape.vc/ Co-founder and CEO, Daniel Sawko: daniel@shipshape.vc Co-founder and COO, Alistair Baillie: alistair@shipshape.vc For more information about this press release please contact: info@shipshape.vc. This release was published by Bradley Evans Ship Shape is the search engine for VC. Tramshed Tech was founded in 2016 and currently operates in Newport, Barry with the main co-working and headquarters based in Grangetowm, Cardiff. To discover Tramshed Tech, please visit: https://www.tramshedtech.co.uk/ Tramshed Tech supports local start-ups through co-working space, creative studios, meeting rooms and community events. Become a member today: https://www.tramshedtech.co.uk/community/

An article from Sydecar Guest Author: Sam Loui As we enter the summer in a market downturn, the thought of finding capital may be daunting. However, there are great capital opportunities for founders who look beyond raising exclusively from VC funds. Founders who have built a loyal community, customers, or network can expand their pool of capital through SPVs. As a founder, fundraising from your community of customers and community is a great source of capital and further aligns your network with your business and its mission. However, when taking all of these checks from angel investors, it can very easily become an administrative headache and even a deterrent for investors in your future funding rounds. Too many lines on your captable can leave your startup dealing with agonizing, slow processes when speed matters most. This is where Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) come in - they help keep your cap table clean and streamline coordination with your investors for the life of your business. An SPV is a company that is formed specifically for the purpose of pooling money from a group of investors to then invest in a single company (such as your startup). By creating an SPV or working with a syndicate lead, you can accept investments from investors with smaller check sizes, which helps you reach a wider audience of potential investors who may not have been able to participate otherwise. Additionally, using an SPV will help keep your cap table clean, which will save you time and money and stay appealing to future investors. Sydecar's SPV enables you to easily spin up an SPV and save thousands of dollars and hours of back and forth with lawyers and accountants. The platform allows you to create a deal page that shows off what makes your company unique, invite investors via easy-to-use invitation links, and manage funding options through ACH or wire. With Sydecar's SPV, there are no upfront fees, and your investors only pay when you close the SPV. Link to Sydecar: https://bit.ly/3PSE3DB Notes: shipshape.vc was founded by Daniel Sawko and Alistair Baillie and is based in Cardiff, Wales. To discover more visit: https://www.shipshape.vc/ This article features a guest writer hosted on shipshape.vc Sydecar is a frictionless deal execution platform for venture investors. The CEO of Sydecar is Nik Talreja. Sam Loui from Sydecar wrote this article. Sydecar's Website: https://www.sydecar.io/ Sydecar's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sydecario/

I've been reading lots about future of jobs wrt AI, particularly on f/e dev. Conclusion: the f/e engineer is dead, long live the f/e engineer. I had to study as I need to plan ahead. One needs a five-year plan (acknowledging all jokes about accuracies of 5-year plans). If you, like me, carry the primary responsibility for planning resource levels, skills etc for your tech company/ division, then you need to bone up on these trends too. More than 50% of 2023 has passed and enough verbage has been spouted since the LLM/AI job apocalypse predictions hit us. After absorbing I've conclude that role will continue to evolve and ongoing upskilling is necessary. But that's just a continuation of a decades-long trend. It's not as if there are any classic noughties "web developers" anymore. We need to: make time for our staff to upskill, and ensure they do. In other words: plus ca change... Transcript: Hi, I'm Alistair, like Grumpy CIO, this week grumpy about the reported death of the front end engineer. Well, the front end engineer is definitely dead. But long live the front end engineer. What nonsense this is I'm talking? Okay, I'm the CIO of a small business. And there's many people out there in sort of similar boats, or you're like a tech leader in some place, you report, report up to a division head about what kind of resources you're going to need for the future, how it's going to impact your ability to deliver on a roadmap. And there's all this stuff talking about how front engineers are dead. So maybe we'll get some headcount planning. I actually don't use this one it's from pigment, just to give people credit where credit's due and look, well, I thought it looked quite cool. So looking at it here. But I have to produce figures like this, and I've had to do so many times in the past. And you have to be aware of future trends going, as we're projecting out for a business, like a five year plan. How many of these types of resources are we going to need? And maybe who needs front front end engineers anyway? Well, not entirely true. Because what does it mean to be a front engineer? Well it used to be that a front engineer used to be able to do some HTML, CSS, a bit of JavaScript, that was about good enough to get you started, I could do that. Today. If I tried to code today, I've looked like the two Muppets on the screen now. Help me Help me Help me not going to work. Go back a bit further. And there were web developers who built these things called websites. I mean, nobody does that today, apart from maybe school project just because they feel like it. You used to be able to enter a developer with some of these much more junior positions available to you, and to be styling components. Speaking to one of our engineers, today, this is Fourth of July, Happy Independence Day, 2023 and talking about joining-in his career in 2018. Now, that's only five years ago. Now at the time, you still had to know something more than just what I just described, you also had to have some knowledge of some kind of JavaScript libraries, you know, maybe not even a little bit of React. But that would basically get your entry level role. That doesn't exist now. So the front end engineer role has already been progressing upwards and upwards and upwards ends in skill sets in this period of time. So we're not talking about the death of the front engineer, we're talking about the evolution of the front end engineer. There is a problem, if you look for junior front end development jobs, this is just one off indeed, in London, they do still exist. The pay is not going up, I would say there is you know inflationary pressures everywhere. It's not a job that's increasing. And I must say long before AI kills off these jobs, certainly in the UK or the US offshoring will have done so these jobs will change and evolve over time, there won't be the junior entry level that we have at the moment. And that does leave us with another problem about how do you enter this career, but save that for another post. But for now, front end engineers are here to stay productivity will continue to increase and go through the roof. If you think about it, does your roadmap just is it completely resourced and balanced? Do you have no resource contentions whatsoever? Or do you have more work to do of course, you have more work to do, than there are people that's not going to change, we'll just increase the productivity. But as we increase the productivity, the expectations will increase. Other companies will increase output, it will get higher and higher and higher. Front end engineers are definitely here to stay. And if you are a business leader, don't be coerced into reducing your front end development on thing on your budget on your plan because you just won't get anything done at all. All right. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair the grumpy CIO of www.shipshape.pc. We are the venture capital search engine come to us to optimise your investor outreach. Find the investors that get what you're talking about. Thank you

If you, like me, are responsible for investing the [time, money, resources] of your company on behalf of your shareholders, then you should be pissed-off with the amount of bullshit spoken about AI. I was motivated at all to start the GrumpyCIO blog because of bullshit being spoken by people who knew even less than I did about AI. Particularly the BS about ChatGPT (phenomenal as it is) pushed me over the edge. For a bit of fun, and to see why AI squirrels could indeed take over the world, I made a mock video showing how transhumans would bond with AI, and that our cerebellum’s capability is so awesome that rather than replacing AI would simply bond with us. I added an MIT video which is the kind of thing bullshit artists use to make their arguments seem plausible. Use our search engine at: www.shipshape.vc Transcript: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. What am I grumpy about this week? I'm grumpy about predictions made about AI with such certainty as if they're going to be true. Absolute cobblers, you don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to make a prediction for you. The squirrel AI overlords are coming to take over the world. Kavi, they are coming. Nonsense, probably. But it's not the first time the ideas come about that actually interaction between human or other animal intelligences. And why would a squirrel be asked to take over the world? Well, let's have a look at what physical species can do. It's amazing. We have this thing called a cerebellum that actually controls movement. There, it's awesome. You can stand up because you have one, you can walk because you have one, you can pee because you have one. And you can drink there because you have one, you're controlling the amazing amount of calculations or predictive movements for know that if you lift up the beer jug at exactly this angle, but in your mouth, you are going to get beer. Now I've talked a little bit about the calculations versus the way that your brain is actually working or probably working. And I suggest going to pick up some popcorn and go into the wonderful MIT lectures that my colleague Gareth introduced me to this is from MIT OpenCourseWare. This is from a wonderful man called Robert Winston rip died in 2019. This is the video link, it'll be on my subject later. But this talks about how actually machine learning might work and how a baby learns to throw and how the cerebellum is 10 times more powerful than the entirety of the rest of your brain put together if measured by the number of neural connections, there are 10 times the number of neural connections and the better controls motor than there is to control the rest of your brain. So why wouldn't AI if it comes to take over the world make use of this we won't be stuck in little back little batteries and the matrix will be controlling machines. And this isn't the first idea to have this has been written in sci fi books for a long period of time. No, you say nobody has ever had these ideas before transhuman is a new idea. It's a completely idea. Never thought of until 2023. Somebody really should have told Mary Shelley that in 1818, these ideas are not new. The fact that the some of this stuff is coming to fruition shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody. Coming back to the squirrels, they're coming. Why the squirrels humanity is just a virus with shoes to quote the late great Bill Hicks. We're very good at doing lots of things. And as a collective intelligence, the way to work together is phenomenal. But if you're going to plug something onto a device to actually control, physical movement, why would you use our cerebellum use a squirrel? If you've seen this video, 24 million views about backpass squirrels from Mark rover again, the link down here go and have a look at it. If you're going to link a computer up and make use of this thing that's already been developed over billions of years of evolution. Go and just do don't use a squirrel. Why bother with the human? The AI squirrels overlords are coming AI will get together with squirrel, get rid of humanity. Absolute nonsense, probably. Now, I am clearly talking cobblers and I don't agree that we've had enough of experts and experts do better than random number guessing I do remember my father getting most annoyed with my younger brother because he bought a lottery ticket with the numbers 510 1525 30 and 35. Why could do that those numbers aren't going to come up. But of course, they are exactly the same logic logically, likely to come up with any other numbers. However, chess boards are different if you actually set up a chess board and completely random positions. One of the interesting things is that chess grandmasters don't really recognise the pattern and they don't necessarily play much better or much worse than other people until they managed to reorganise the board into a way that they recognise. But actually, if you just recognise the pattern and come through, then a grandmaster does better kind of a bit of a weak analogy may be the same but yes, don't just believe in me for the fact that because squirrel AI overlords are coming do you actually listen to experts but listen to experts not just some random BS or on a YouTube feed telling you and particularly not someone who's just interested in it because I put money against it. Listen to the actual people know what we're talking about. And they just run roll their eyes at these the some of the gibberish that is spoken by legislators. There is something coming with AI obviously, you don't know what it is. But maybe you do. You've been warned. The squirrel AI overlords are coming to get you. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair, the CIO of grumpy CIO of www.shipshape.vc. We are the free investor search engine come to us to optimise your investor outreach. See you soon

At Ship Shape we all (not just the Exec) try to work to an ethical standard. We take positions on things, how we treat each other, because "it's the right thing to do". We roughly agree with each other on what that "right thing" is, which helps, and sometimes 100% agree. But more interesting is when we don't quite agree. When that happens we don't sweep it under the carpet, we discuss and align. And we don't force each other into another's position, our conversations are thoughtful. Looking back, In the 90s strippers were allowed on trading room floors. Growing-up my mother prevented my mind from being infected with ideas of sectarian violence, from my N. Irish heritage. We at Ship Shape took the position to engage Ukrainian team members directly after invasion in Feb 2022. All examples of Standards and Ethics that workplaces need to grapple with. Schools play a big role in this, but the workplace does too. I'm proud of the standard we hold at Ship Shape, and here's a vid on why it matters. Transcript: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. And what am I grumpy about this week are generally talking about this week: 'moral standards in the workplace' - heavy stuff right? This week is the beginning of June 2023, there's whole load of news about Philip Schofield, but also continuing things about how to approach the war on Ukraine, and generally ethics and standards in the workplace. Now we at ShipShape, I'm proud to say, operate a business to a standard that I think we can be proud of. But as a small company, and if you're a startup, I think you can do, and you will do and I think it does matter. Before I go into that, though, a bit of a timeline in history. What's happened in my lifetime, as an old bugger who started working in the 90s. Going through into the early noughties I largely worked on things like trading floors. Now trading floors weren't exactly the most PC environments in the world. It is before my time, but I knew just before my time that there were strippers on the trading room floor, there was certainly a whole load of sexist commentary on the trading floor even when I got there. But working in banks and trading environments, things changed quite rapidly in the early noughties. At a particular bank, which I worked at in Australia (and I worked at a few, name remains unmentioned) a person, a gentleman, did a boisterous act and got fired. Quite an interesting case because actually, he didn't want to do it. There was some drinks after work, alcohol was involved. And he was encouraged into a rugby style, you know, sort of rugby bonding style act, he very much didn't want to do it was basically bullied into it, but he got fired. So this kind of really took him everyone back. The sexist commentary stopped on the floor. It was a real suppression moment when it came. Now the thing was, it was only weakly put to bed, there was only a weak lid on it. It was still there. I, as an ingenue coming in, didn't know much about this, I just kind of thought this is everyone's acting quite normally, quite reasonably. But when a particular exec was required to sign up for regular documents, a colleague of mine, up to that point a respected colleague of mine 'c'arn, give him a blowie' we were in Australia. And I was stunned and shocked, that he would actually say that. Now he whispered it rather than talking to you out loud, because he knew he wasn't supposed to say it, but it was suppressed. And the point was, I hadn't actually changed. So when you actually don't allow things to come into the workplace or come into a school (come back to later), as well, are you actually making change or suppressing things? In some sense, you might say you're just suppressing things, because whilst you might have some Twittersphere outrage, or whilst the #metoo movement might have some victories, for example, Harvey Weinstein, you know, being put where he belongs, also, you have bursting back out of the seams in the last few years Voldemort as I call him, the person that is in Romania under investigation and who I refuse to name or even showing a pixelated version of his face, because it will just add to his own social media feed. But if you've been following British news, you know who I'm talking about. So this has come out of the wood, this stuff was suppressed over time, but it's just bursting back out. So does it matter? If you actually just suppress the stuff any change actually happen? I argue yes. Because my mother, God bless her Northern Irish heritage, and her mother before refused to allow me and my brother and other people to be infected with the bigotry that was flowing through at the time, I remember going to see my family on as I was seven, and they were in the proddy part of the world. And they were talking about 'the damn Catholics'. And I was absolutely shocked because my mother had never spoken this way. And these ideas were completely new to me. And they didn't stay in my head, my mother wouldn't let it happen. So by the time I grow up, it's simply not there. Whereas other negative ideas that have come up: sexist ideas, racist ideas that you expunge from yourself over time, kind of like 80s song lyrics, they're still stuck there in the back there. So I think by not allowing these things through, maybe I'm already ruined, but my daughter won't be and she will grow up in a better world. So I think it's worthwhile. And you know, just by way of further example, you can't burn a witch nowadays. Good idea at the time apparently, sounds utterly ridiculous now, cruel, inhuman and stupid. So why is the workplace got anything to do with this, and also bring schools into this because they're the places we spend a lot of time on, as you know, through our years, our schools and the workplaces, schools are definitely on the frontline of this stuff. Schools are expected to teach morals and ethics. And as my wife and I have been going around to look for schools for our daughter there's been a strong part of that. They have safeguarding officers, they have ethics that are taught by one of the teachers. And this is now a part of actually teaching children a code of living. Really, really controversial, really hard to do. Because you're trying to agree a coded standard of ethics, whose code and standard of ethics? You're always going to offend someone, it's hard to do. It's really difficult for teachers to do, and a thing that teachers are finding hard to deal with is Voldemort the person in Romania. Because how do they deal with that? There are also other topics that are incredibly hard to deal with the British Empire. How do you teach the British Empire - just ignore it? Certainly I know from some other history teachers I was talking to for a large period, we just stopped teaching it. Whereas when I was at school, the only thing that got caught in GCSE history was British history from 1815 to 1924, ie the bits where we won. Now completely changed. Now, for workplaces, you will often hear talk about ethics and standards, and we talk about our values. But look at the stuff like as shown on the screen here: principled, reliability, trust responsibility. These are things that considered "business ethics", but we don't talk about other things. Why not? And does it make a difference? Well, I think it does. It's important, it's important and it helps you as a small company to have kind of a standard. At Ship Shape, we do talk about the right thing to do, when we talk about how to treat ourselves, how to treat all of our team, you know, ourselves and all of our team, but also how to treat the people we engage with as business partners to how to be our customers. Are you doing the right thing? It doesn't have to be loud. You don't have to be talking be brash about it, but you do have to be continuous. An example is where are quiet, but continuous position on Ukrainian conflict. Now, this is very personal for a number of us, not least me my wife is Russian Ukrainian. She has Ukrainian native speaking family, Russian native speaking family, all from Ukraine, this is a very, very direct conflict, very personal, and very painful. Other members of our staff are also impacted as well. When the conflict started, we actually made a deliberate decision as a business that we are going to engage some people from Ukraine to work with us. And we did so. And we have three members of staff of the Ship Shape team living in Ukraine now. So we made this and we will produce quiet things like this for our voice. We don't do it loudly. It's not a big brash thing. Particularly, you know, I don't want my wife's family to get in too much trouble. But it is part of the position that we have. No sexist behaviour, no racist behaviour, no items like this. Yes, we have a standard of how we act. Business Ethics are "considered easier". It's like make sure you pay your staff staff on time and treating their financial matters with diligence, respect, that kind of thing . But also we have a broader standard as well. And I think that's very important to us. And I think as a small business, you can perhaps do it easier than a large business where it just gets lost in "Are we at risk of litigation from this" is kind of question that comes up. So the Scofield thing that came up there the last few weeks, any big company I've ever been in the question wouldn't be possibly "was he right or was he wrong", but "what's the litigation risk and what's the reputational risk". As a smaller company you can actually start off with "what are we", as a group agree what is the right thing to do. You can largely agree with each other as we often do, but more interesting is when you don't agree with each other. And we have quite passionate conversations about what we do or don't agree over when we come to a position together as a company. Thanks for watching. I am Alistair the CIO of www.shipshape.vc. Come to us to optimise your investor outreach. We are the free venture capital investor search engine

What’s the most creative way your team have given you feedback? One of my teams once took the time to stab a toy Gollum/Smeagol in its plastic heart with a red pen, and spread the ink over tissue paper so it looked like it was bleeding to death. Apparently some decisions I’d taken earlier that day were unpopular! Some of my best friends came from that team, good times :) How did we end-up there? From 2003-2005, for reasons known only to a higher power, I was given command of a grown-up multi-million dollar project. The team would grow to 33 staff at peak, including permanent staff, contractors, and assigned vendor staff. I had never managed anyone, knew nuffink. It was and remains the most intense period of my professional career, and the most formative. Fortunately I wasn’t completely stupid and knew I had to recruit managers into this team who actually knew what they were doing. Nearly half the team came from one vendor, and I won the battle to have the vendor I felt I needed, based on the PM allocated to be in charge there. His name was Vince Di Chiara, who taught me loads and has since gone on to much higher things than teaching me. I also brought in a good friend who was significantly more competent than me in organisation, Richard Davis. We kinda tbh made up his job as we went along, which you could get away more easily in them days. But he was vital. After the project the vendor hired Richard, so impressed were they. I survived the project despite my absolute lack of experience by simply working like a maniac. Not a management method I recommend, and can’t have been great for the team (though comfortingly I received positive words from several, years afterwards). The team were made up of the usual IT crowd: intelligent, good-humoured, whilst an HR manager’s nightmare. For my birthday they clubbed together and bought me talking Gollum/Smeagol toy. At the time I was rocking a shaved head and obvious body-piercings (something of a look in a traditional bank’s Steering Committees), I admit the appearance matched. The toy had a Gollum head (bad), and a Smeagol head (good), and they could be changed. The team would thus jovially walk up to my desk and swap heads depending on whether they thought the direction I was leading in was a good idea. It came out of nowhere, but became a “thing” and was a great interaction tool. Enabled immediate feedback and took away any hint of potential confrontation if the feedback were negative. And the ultimate "Boss, I think we’re going the wrong way” from the team? Genius. Here’s where I talk about this and other “how not to be a good boss” tips that I’ve learnt. Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. What am I grumpy about this week crap boss says who's had one who is one - hope not! But we should be bossing this bossing stuff. Now slight operational risk risk moment for everybody who's invested in a customer of shipshape, our team actually die laughing that I'm presenting this to everybody. But nonetheless, I'm going to press ahead. Right, how not to be a good boss, I've experienced a lot of these things, formed an opinion. Here's some stuff I'm putting out to start with some hygiene factors: time sheeting, measuring, to the last 15 minutes, five minutes, everything that people do, doesn't work doesn't produce any increased productivity for you. It just pisses everybody off, and people just create an art of lying into it. Similarly, clock watching why, like, if you have good staff, and they're into it, you don't have to worry really about when they start to finish they want to contribute, because otherwise, why would they be there, they're gonna get into it. Most of the teams I've been involved in the problem is actually clock watching to get people to go away and stop working because they just into solving problems. Generally being asked now I'm not going to deal with it. But you know, abusive behaviour, definitely dump it. Very important: management by KPIs. This is something that's come up so much in the entirety of my career. You gotta have smart goals, smart, measurable, specific, measurable, whatever, just know, like, yes, KPIs are very important, but they help you manage, they are not the purpose or objective of manage managing the, the idea that got put out so much a lot of management textbooks in my careers. And if you can't manage it, you can't measure it and you want the other way around or whatever, can see how much I seriously I take it no, you measure things in order to help you manage, not the other way round, there are certain things that are just non negotiables, the p&l of the company, the balance sheet, everything else is there to help you. Alright, gratitude to who's helped and who's contributed and who suffered for working with or for me, the entire Project Tango team, you know who you are from 2003 to five, this image on the screen up here is a Gollum or a Smeagol. Great bit of management feedback. This was my first attempt at bossing a team. They had a bought toy for me for my birthday with a goal amid nasty or sneakerhead. Nice. And I would walk back to my desk and generally get feedback from the team of how well I was doing as a boss by actually having the goal and more Smeagol heads just left there. One time, I clearly wasn't having a great day because somebody had taken the time to get some tissue paper, a red pen, and actually drill a hole and fought form Smeagol or Gollum being stabbed to death in the heart and all the reading coming off of the tissue paper. Clearly hadn't been my finest hour. Well... let's go forward Jenny Waugh. Now. This is a lady who worked for me late noughties. And by this stage, I thought I was a pretty amazing boss. I'm the man. Everyone's working for me. And she just turned around to me, she had a very strong Irish accent that I'm not going to copy and just basically told me I was a bit useless at this. What she did give me some specific feedback as to why which was able to cooperate and we'll get back into lessons I've learned later. Marguerite Hudson taught me so much by basically being a really good boss. Fantastic, everyone at Caplin. I'd been a big corporate apparatchik person all the way through the naughties. And then came into Caplin to work in smaller companies in high growth companies and had to relearn how to do this again and got taught by them so much fantastic. Finally, Richard Davis, you know who you are, taught me so much. So how to be a good boss, what for me, it goes in various stages to what your requirements are being a good boss was someone working in a tech department actually changes by the time that they're actually there. So there's a very different modes before someone starts even and on their first day to when they've been there for a while. And I go through, I think I've been learned to mentor to the mistakes I've made one by one. So first of all, before they start, have a bullet point, job description, and remove the crap. Just if you can get a job description down to this and just talk through it with people fantastic, have what you want them to do for the first three weeks and first 90 days, handwritten is actually great. Or just a simple Google Sheet or whatever that you've pulled together. It's much better than having a formal job description it shows that you've thought about it very reassuring the person on the first day that you've actually considered that they want to do rather than just printed on something of Chat GPT to say, here's your job description. Day one, show that you care about their working environment, how you'll pay them, I have worked in a place where they couldn't work out how to pay me 12 weeks after I started and apparently was my fault, but it wasn't really very happy with that. What?! Have a machine for them, make sure they have all the logins, the environment, everybody cocks this up including us at Shipshape and everybody a little bit. But try and your staff will definitely appreciate it for you. Give to have very specific targets. So again, before you get there, write down I want you to do this over the next couple of days show that you've thought about it show that you thought how these tasks tasks mattered to the job to the company, how they're contributing straightaway immediately, but also how they start them integrating the rest of the team so they can start discover the job for themselves. Here, idea is to let them go. And very much my passionate belief is that you know, people drive the ship themselves. And once you've worked out the different compartments of the ship, then let the people go and run them. And there's a book out there called Turn the Ship Around that both myself and my business partner who introduced it to me very firmly believe in. But for the first few weeks, while the team is still working out how to work together do get involved in moulding it basically they do all that your work your your job is to be the boss to do your bloody job and actually help help the team go together because somebody needs to make that decision. And it's unfair, just to let people just have completely free will, everybody just gets annoyed at each other. But then once they're in space that worked out the job: norming. Freedom, again, as rifted on in previous videos, people in IT departments all over like solving problems. So let them just give them the freedom to do to there'll be overall company goals, project goals that every knows they've got to achieve, just let them do it. that you get rid of them, it literally means that they're bored. So how you've got a talented person, what are you going to do about that change up the job, change the job, it is worthwhile having this discussion, but this is a phase that goes through from like when you start through to the end, and hopefully I try and practice what I preach. It is slaughtered by all our team after I've put this out. And the number of ways I haven't done this properly, and so many other different ways that I'm absolutely shit as being a boss. But these are all things that I've cocked up before over a 20 year period sharing with you there is a phase that you go through and don't do by bloody numbers and specific measurements or like reading so many management textbooks. It is it just is nonsense. Humans don't work that way and people build software for builds products that builds profits. Thanks for watching. I am Alistair the CIO of www.shipshape.vc come to us to optimise your venture, your venture capital outreach, you find investors for us that will just get what you're talking about. Thank you

Something on generative-AI, GPT-4, Bard, LLaMa, etc, that is actually interesting: using the history of Physics as an analogy. IMO there are two approaches to absorbing this new knowledge. 1. Find the AI operators to replace Classical operators 2. Start with a fresh sheet of paper We could be inspired to think of… James Maxwell’ famous equations, published in final form in his 1865 “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” meeting the discovery of Special Relativity. Maxwell’s equations stacked-up. And then the continuous 20th century investigation of quantum theory that led to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the “fresh sheet of paper”. With QED the entire framework of thinking, the mechanics behind Maxwell’s equations, completely changed. So in one sense “panic panic everything is destroyed!”. However, in reality Maxwell’s equations still work perfectly, by which I mean 100% perfectly, in most situations. Electrical engineers solving the most hideously complex and intellectually challenging problems never need worry about QED. I am confident that we will pick apart what all these new AI capabilities and what they change in a similar manner. Video to come tomorrow, with some hopefully interesting links for those who want more than [censored] emoji-laden spam in their feed. Transcript 0:00 Hi, I'm Alistair and the grumpy CIO on what am I grumpy about this week? Well, actually, I'm not grumpy, I'm more kind of frustrated, because there's all this call that we need to reimagine our businesses and the face of the eye and reimagine our society in the face of AI. There's very little actual framework in what we should actually do for that. And particularly as a small business owner, I don't have the advantage of having the State Department I think, do the thinking for me. So here's a framework that arrived very much inspired by classical physics. I studied at university about how we can think about the operators use cases within our business and also approach it as a fresh sheet of paper. Credits where credit's due, this comes from Michael Jeffrey Booker, who wrote this wonderful book here, essays and physics, you can see on the screen, I'm not being paid to promote this at all. But modern classical optics, I seem to remember reading going, that's most of the lecture notes he gave us going through, I owe this man an incredible, great debt of gratitude. I know there's so many people out there who are people who taught them debt of gratitude, as well shout out to Dr. Sukumar, too. But physics is the end of the 19th century, as taught to me by Dr. Brooker was actually I'll use the word smug wasn't his work, but it's I'm gonna go for it. Because things have been discovered by Newton and then by Maxwell and other places, and we're in quite a good, good state, we thought, you know, basically everything on here was kind of filling in the filling in the gaps dotting your eyes, crossing the t's, and making sure that physics just worked, then suddenly come with two different things. One is called relativity and the other one's called quantum mechanics. And they completely overturned quantum energy on arriving quantum, which arrived later, quantum mechanics like overturned everything. And they have to go and rethink what it meant that these laws that they previously thought were fundamental just how things worked, worked. And I think that's where we are, we're there's a state where business just works the way it does. And we have always assumed it, there's always a certain thing, or a finance department has a certain number of people because they do certain functions. And we will be repeating those things. So things like what we need to do is go What's the AI equivalent of assigning an account code to an invoice? What's the equivalent of assessing a gun retreat if you're a dentist or of tracking your livestock if you're in mass agriculture, or use case for use case five, etc. where this came from out in physics, as well as they had to look at how to calculate momentum and what actually meant in a relativistic worlds. And they ended up with if you remember from your school momentum, linear momentum is mass times velocity, you may remember it from middle school, you're feeling smug about yourself now? Well, actually, in reality, it's gamma mass times velocity velocity cameras a function of your velocity in your reference frame, your inertial reference frame, and it's one over the square root of one minus v squared over c squared, which is, in most cases, just one. So it doesn't make any difference. Why does that make any mistake, it's also looking at something they looked at all this stuff and went for all reasonable use cases, this is incredible thing, but momentum is just calculated exactly the same way in any real example. Similarly, Newton's second law, you might remember that one force equals mass times acceleration, well, actually force equals mass times acceleration, kind of when you're in your normal frame of reference is looking around. When you're outside of that, it actually just completely different things. And what they discovered if you go and look at things like quantum electrodynamics, us where we end up later, is that the actual fundamental reality of how things interact with on force on each other, was completely different. But as the laws that we thought were fundamental for Newton, and we're just how things worked, were actually derivation of some underlying truth or assumptions or axioms, that then changed. Now that's the same for business, I think, is that there's a bunch of things that we assume are working, a lot of the stuff will just stay the same. But some things will actually have to sort of go well actually doesn't work anymore. And in certain extreme cases, or because AI will simply just break up and the break break down the underlying accident or underlying functions of how it works, will end up actually just doing completely different things. So we could also do is come in with a fresh clean sheet of paper. So at the beginning of quantum electrodynamics, there's a guy called Richard Feynmann read his autobiography, because I'm a nerd. And he wrote these things called Fineman diagrams in the physics, you'll recognise that's a Feynmann diagram. And what he did, there was a guy called Julian shringar, quite famously, was producing pages and pages of pages of voluminous equations about how everything might work and Fineman just kind of threw everything away and just went, Well, what happens if you just represent the world this way, you don't need all that stuff. Just think about think about it differently. You've simplified your world. And this just works. He was roundly laughed at, initially by the senior series and senior physicists for doing this split came up. And what he was quite famous for in his You will actually come up with how AI will affect your business. And it doesn't always have to be bad news, a guy called James Clarke Maxwell, if you're in London and you're walking down Holden towards the strategy past the King's College, or part of the King's College campus, there's a big picture of it on the wall. And he wrote some famous things called Maxwell's equations that explain electromagnetism. They were written again in the 19th century, he published his paper in 1860, final version in 1865. And then when it went through the 20th century, they actually discovered that they actually just work. Even in quantum theory in any perceivable way, quantum electrodynamics only actually makes a difference. If you're in really extreme conditions, like you're smashing an atom, or something's very, very far away, or very, very small, etc. These are the conditions that cause because cosmological differences or tiny quantum differences, everything else and Maxwell's equations just work. And in relativity, they just weren't full stop. So special relativity. So your ideas will survive AI. Some of them will change, you'll have different operators, you'll have some bits, we just come up with a simple sheet sheet of paper, but your ideas will survive AI, you just have to start off with a list of the top going where all the use cases go down. And where it gets fun, funny and funky, put that aside, and come in separately going reimagined my business, as if we were just starting with us just start from scratch. Put those two things together, write it all down, you'll come up with a picture. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair the grumpy CIO of www.shipshape.vc come to our store optimizer investor outreach. We are the free venture capital search engine. Thanks for watching.

Founders, startup CIOs, make use of easy tools to manage costs. We were migrating data through complicated stuff involving NLP (AI thingummy), and using scary stuff with funny names/ acronyms (like "Lambda"). Could have gone pear-shaped. AWS has a Cost Explorer that looks hard but is dead easy to use. Even I can use it. By taking simple measurements of cost that everyone could understand we were able to decide our path. Watch my video below to see why and how Transcript: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. What am I grumpy about this week? I'm grumpy about startup founders, startup CIOs not taking advantages of simple tools that they can use to make life easier. For example, AWS Cost Explorer. So what is AWS cost Explorer? And how do you get to it? Well, you go to AWS amazon.com. And you log in, if you haven't gotten an account, you will have to set one up. But it's no more difficult than setting up an account in Google or anywhere else. I happen to use multi factor authentication with a with the authenticator. But again, that's no more difficult to set up and you have MFA anywhere else, you end up going to cost Explorer, you just put it in here in the search bar, just right cost Explorer, and it will show you your costs. Now, a couple of quirks you will find about things to explore. So if I make this go from the first to the 10th, all I did was go to the date picker and do that, you'll see that the costs on this first day are a bit higher. Why is that? What's this big purple lump. It's called tax. And you see how I can get to it, I just hover over it. And it just tells me what it is, there is a doubt there is a breakdown here and I can download this as CSV if I want to take it away and do some analysis in Excel or anywhere else. But this is so simple, you really don't need to. But one quirk you do have to know is that tax all gets paid. At the beginning of the month, you accrue a lot of costs, and then they bill you and you pay the tax at once. So I'm just gonna get out of having the text displayed there. Again, I'm just going to the date picker clicking Apply. And then I can see something that I really quite liked to see, which is the cost of very stable, I don't know what they are, because I can see them. And you can see there's these words down here, elastic container service, ECS relational database, or RDS like a SQL database or something like that. EC2 ELB. What's that? What's an elastic load balancer? And again, you can kind of look at these things and talk about it. So if you don't know all the words are, that's fine. If this is already enough information to go to your tech team and go, what's that number, what's it for and why. And you'll build up a picture of what your costs are really easily. There's lots of other things you can do on here. They give you reports, budgets, there's a cost anomaly detection, you can look at purchase saving plans, which is where they want you to pay up front for 12 months, but they give you a discounts. There are some recommendations, which have never actually been in use for me because we're already doing stuff. And there's all these things you can do on the right hand panel, just just don't this is all if you're a founder of a startup, this is already enough information for you to go to your tech team and go lost that place. One thing you will offer a little quirk in AWS is that I can ask for hourly breakdown as well. The problem is it costs you money. So we don't do that. Because we're a startup, why would we do that. So daily is something you get out of the box when you actually just sign up for AWS cost explorer. But literally, this is all the information you need to go and ask questions. So we had a real life use case to make to make use of AWS cost Explorer, we were monitoring data across we have existing data, we had millions of records millions of files that we wanted to take from an old solution into a new solution. We actually ran this stuff through an NLP pipeline, natural language processing AI, every loves a bit of AI, it's all hot topic. As I'm recording this in May 2023, we've got some lovely a train models that we've used, and it works on some AWS Lambdas. If you don't know what a Lambda is, don't worry, it's basically a computer that fires up as you need it. So it only does things when you need it. Why do we do this? Because we end up with searchable results, news to present integrated with our data. Right? So the problem was, we're going how do we actually know how much it's going to cost to run all this stuff through our through our funky tools? And the answer is just go and look, go and test it. And out of the box, you get this cost Explorer, and it just gives you some results. Now we actually as you said, we don't have the hourly, we have the daily. So we want a daily snapshot, do a test come back next day look at the cost. That's a bit of a pain, because you'd like to do it like moment by moment, or startup. But fortunately, it's a startup, we've got lots of other work to do at the same time. But simply this tool just worked. And we're able to see, look, these lambda costs here you can see them they spiked up on a particular couple of days. And we don't like the look of that. So we actually made a decision based off the simpler information to actually move that particular set of code out of the lambda into another, another place that just ran on continuous compute. So yeah, you can just get simple information from AWS Cost Explorer. You don't have to be digging deep into configuration tools. It just gives you a nice, simple report. You can have a conversation with your tech team, so just do so. Thanks for watching. I am Alistair the grumpy CIO for www.shipshape.bc. We are the free investor search engine come into what your business does and find investors that get you to optimise your investor outreach. Thanks for watching. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Startups and SMEs, get your DevOps in order. Which doesn't mean just ordering a dev to do it. Take it seriously, DevOps is its own skillset, practice. But how to resource? We looked through outsourcing, internal resourcing, training. Good DevOps makes you money, plain and simple. It's not "just a cost-centre" any more than sales people are. Get your DevOps practices right and you will be able to move fast. But how? In-house, outsource? Spoiler: we kept in-house, and the cost comparison in the video shows why. But there are risks, DevOps are a vital springboard for everything else. Make sure whoever joins is and feels part of your team. Transcript: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO on what am I grumpy about this week? I am grumpy about startups seeing DevOps as a cost, not an opportunity to accelerate your business. First of all, what is DevOps? And most founders, let's face it are business people. If you're a tech startup founder, this probably doesn't apply to you. But most startup founders are business people, and what are you getting what you're paying for? What's all this mysterious stuff? And it's everything I'm putting up on the screen here, the sysadmin, the scripting, specific coding tasks, it's everything techie and complicated. Let's just keep it that simple enough definition, you can break it down a tech personal, true tech person will break it down to lots more, but let's keep it simple like that. So how do you handle it? normal startup, plug it on a dev, it's what hired you for go and deal with it. It's sticky stuff development solution as part of a solution. Great, slight variant on that I've seen happen a lot is the CTO does all of it. Because you're a business focused startup founder, you bring on this person, you're trying to keep costs down. So the next resources, you bring on a very, very low skill, your CTO ends up being responsible for all the DevOps, and they basically drown in that. What are the alternatives? Well, you can outsource it. And there are a lot of great businesses out there to do that, too. And you get brilliant coverage for your business, you get like really the great architectural setup, you can't get great monitoring, guaranteed performance 24/7 coverage you might get as well. It's brilliant. It's quite expensive, though. Particularly if you're starting up. Well, you can also do is hire a dedicated resource. Well, that's pretty scary, isn't it? But suddenly talking about increasing cost base? What happens? Where do you put them as well, you might offshore the resource. Even scarier, you're basically giving someone the keys to your kingdom, and you might not have ever met them in person. Very scary. The other thing is, we'll have enough to do. And spoiler alert, this is where we went, the person who actually joined our team eventually raised this and they're having in that as they were having their initial discussions with us, they said, What am I going to do after six months to six months worth of problems? What do I do then? And the answer is, we're a growing company, that will be enough to do and there was, what about the cost options, because that's what really a lot of this comes down to So devs do it, it's free, it's not free, not free at all, you'll lose 20 to 30% of your deaf time sounds like a lot 20 to 30%, yes, you will lose 20 to 30% of your deaf time. If you're just making devs do DevOps, you probably actually just end up having one of them off to actually do it most of the time, and they're not doing as well as if you've actually gotten dedicated first in the first place. In house, you get a full time person, as I said, there's risks with that. And one of the risks is that they might not have all the skills, which means you end up having to get some outsourced support anyway, to add the cost to it. So you're really if you're gonna go that option, you really have to get the team member carefully. The other thing is you can outsource it, as I said, it's brilliant, you get amazing coverage, but realistically, you'll get between two and six days per month of FTE equivalents. And it can be as low as two six is a great deal. So that leaves you a lot of coverage that you don't have or a lot of extra expense, you have to have to take things forward. So as I said, what did we do? Well, we went with one expert person that we spent a long time finding this person. The other thing about bringing in DevOps people is make sure they're part of the team. I've worked in so many companies where the DevOps people sort of have their own stand up selves elsewhere. They kind of feel like they're in part of the IT Crowd you know, that TV programme with a strange people in the gubbins of the business. Even within developers, you can do this, this lowest monkey people. Don't do that. Make sure they're part of your team. You're not bringing on staff, you're bringing on a team member who will actually help the rest of the team perform better, integrated work. Make sure as I said, the standards are shared so people know it's visible, make sure they can see what's happened, give them dedicated projects. So they're not just picking up stuff that just the developers need and not just support lackeys. They're actually an important and integral member of the team. And now if you do all this, none of the situation we're in which is there the first personal life devs go to, because they've got this incredible brain, they look at things differently. And it's an incredibly valuable resource that's accelerated hugely, the driver of our company. So yes, as I said, bring a team member, not a staff member. And you will take your company forward hugely make the most of it DevOps, it accelerates your growth. It does not just a cost base cost base. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO of www.shipshape.vc. We are the free venture capital search engine comm and improve your investor outreach. Come on to our site, find investors and get what you're talking about. Thank you

Talk to your team. Sometimes you might feel that the company needs to "get this done" and "JFDWI" But ask the team first. They will surprise you, always, because they are collectively (and individually!) smarter than you are on your own. We had this on a big (for us) migration in January. We asked the team, and they thought about the pros and cons. And said, "you know what, let's just do this. And if something happens we'll JFDWI" But they made the call, and if they'd gone the other way then we'd have done that instead. It's not weak leadership, it's strong management. Watch my video about this below. Transcription: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. What am I grumpy about this week, bloody startups who don't engage and get the best value out of their team, ask them how you should run your business, you employ them. They're brilliant. You have a team, not just like some human staff that work for you, engage them and ask their opinions. We had the situation earlier this year, we normally run by the methodology, slower, steady, steady as fast. It's a cultural thing where you're trying to just move as quickly as you possibly can by moving very steadily. The interweb says it comes from the Navy SEALs. I've heard other attributions, but it's something we live by what happens when you actually just need a big bag implementation? And you're in a startup? What do you do? The traditional Big Bang implementation would take a long time planning vast numbers, resources, business implementations, plans, gap analysis, as is to be stated to be states, etc, etc. You're in a startup, what do you do? Well, we asked our team, we had this situation where we were we had built things in a non relational database MongoDB. But the further we actually explored them into our product, we realised that looks like a duck smells like a duck, it's a duck. Actually, this is relational data. And we need to move a lot of that into a sequel solution. We chose Postgres. We also had a lot of stuff we've been experimenting with as a business. And we've actually started the product is actually sort of make early revenue from it. This was all driven off spreadsheet at the time, that doesn't scale needs to put that on to an automated solution as well. There were some things that we kept on Mongo, non relational databases are very good for certain things. And we kept the information there. And there was some things that at the time, we kept on spreadsheets since January 2023, they have also been automated. But for this, even understanding that was a big deal. All of this is a big deal for us. So what did we do? We asked the team. So we said, there's a couple of ways of doing this one, the big bank approach, as I said, lots of documentation, but very safe. The other is to just deal with it, which is what that acronym stands for. And we went and asked the team, what their choices were, how they should think they should work through the business, how they should, how they think that they'll deal with the situations that come up, one thing that has to happen is customers could never be impacted that that couldn't happen. But there's a lot of stuff where if we take the just deal with it approach, we may end up scrambling, you know, in the evening in the nights to do things that otherwise should have been automated, we may end up scrambling around them taking hours to do things that should just happen automatically. In seconds, we may find that the data errors, we're having to fix swans paddling under the surface, so our customers don't see it. And the team thought about it. And they went with option one, and we just dealt with it. So trust your team, share where you are all the time, they'll really feel like they're there with you, you're in a startup, they're not going to walk out and say I don't care, I'm just sharing, they feel part of it. They are a team, not just a human resources, human staff, asked for collective input, be prepared, be willing to be overridden. And that happens to myself and Daniel my business partner a lot that we come up and the team just says, kinda right but different flavour. And it goes, thanks, but not quite. Use executive override, very rarely. I was blessed early in my career to work directly for Alan Moss, who at the time was the CEO of Macquarie group in Australia. And there were a couple of times in the year where he took every selective inputs. They wanted to go on path A and he just very calmly went well, I think we'd all agree we're going on path B then and there was a chuckle going around the room. The reason there was a chuckle. There was a recognition that he was the CEO and he could do this, but he only did very, very, very rarely. He engaged and trusted all the people on that team, which is why they were super empowered and produce the spectacular business results than they did for a very long time. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair, the CIO of www.shipshape.vc. We are the searching for venture capital come to us to optimise your adventure outreach and trust your team. Thank you

CEOs managing tech staff? Bloomin' important in a startup. Most think they are but aren't/ think they can't and don't. But all can. Consistency of vision, continuous clear communication... ... let your tech staff know where you're all going. And then let them solve all the problems in getting there. Transcript Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO or what am I grumpy about this week? This week, I'm grumpy about CEOs in tech management. Well, actually not all of them, because some of them are completely bloody amazing. And let's talk about some of the good traits about our CEO can help manage tech, which in a startup company, many of us software related is very important, and not be a complete, which many are. So what's one of the points I centrally think is that it's all one, there's all the normal CEO stuff that you think is really hard. So setting the strategy, the vision, the business, the product, and service, where are we going? What's it? What are we going to be delivering on? Storytelling, very important if you're in startup community for like your customers, but also for your investors? What do we do, there's a very important part of being a personal presence for SEO for more than any other online company, like increasingly on social media. But also in person, there's still a time in place for people to impress people as a CEO with the way they speak at events, not like me. But there's also tech leadership and tech management. And the whole one of the first things of being a good CEO for managing tech reserve resources is that all one, you don't go and do your CEO job, and then go and manage your techies. You know, the dirty people in the corner, there are a cost centre don't know quite know what they do. Most of being a good CEO and tech management is just being a good CEO. But actually communicating that with everybody all the time and continuously, because it's part of what you do not communicating it in a one off meeting where you're going to meet the techies. And then you go back and do other things. So in stand ups every day, share what you're doing. Tell them a little bit about leadership versus management. So what am I talking about so many different things, leadership, very simple, where we're going for me, so like, standing on the bridge, Captain Jack, Sparrow, management is how we get there, Captain Jack Sparrow, not necessarily the best person about that. And I think there are many CEOs that go into this category. So they therefore think I can't manage techiques. But actually, they can, because there's some co awesomeness in tech management. First of all consistency. Most See, this is really the most vital point. Most people who work in it, most people who work in it, like solving problems. So let them just don't get in the way be consistent about the problems that need to be solved. And they'll do it for you. Listen to them, when they come and say, Actually, I'm not sure about this very low level feature, or the overall business strategy for the business. They usually quite bright people have thought about it. So listen and find out why. Slower, steady, steady as fast. This is a phrase, we use it shipshape, it's not ours, we have very much adopted it from other people, the fastest way to get something done is to do it properly the first time steadily and make sure you got it right. Be cool under pressure, there'll be so many times as a CEO, where you're getting flack the rest of your staff done, but you've just got to keep your calm and don't make any ridiculous demands. The vast number of people in IT departments suffer from being hit with ridiculous demands, changing demands inconsistency. And it's just incredibly demotivating. And they don't know what problems they're supposed to be solving. And they certainly don't know, they certainly think they can't be solved in the time that's allocated. So don't do that. Set the strategy and get out of the way. There is a lack of excuse in small businesses for this in a large business, you get someone who's a division head, who has a CEO above them, who has a board above them, and they have been told that this major programme of work will be delivered on X date in April next year. And there is no manoeuvring around that. And a startup. We, for some reason, we're almost even worse. It's like because we're a startup, we must cut all corners. Do everything pivot between Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We must just ignore quality and just get delivery done. No, just No, no, just be consistent. Become it's scary. Set the strategy. Get out of the way. Your staff, your IT staff love solving problems. Let them thank you very much. I'm Alistair. I'm the CIO of shipshape.vc. We are the venture capital search engine come to us for free to find investors that get you thank you